[ltp] Re: So what _is_ advantage of 2.6 kernel on a Thinkpad?

Jeffrey Taylor linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Mon, 22 Mar 2004 08:50:26 -0600


Quoting Tod Harter <tharter@giantelectronicbrain.com>:
> I have to agree. Overall the 2.6 kernel is NOT as stable as a good 
> 2.4.20+ with whatever patches you need.I've found a lot of problems, and 
> they get worse when you turn on preemption. Audio and Video playback, 
> despite the theoretical promise of better scheduling and preemption seem 
> to be MUCH inferior. I can't even get XMMS to play an mp3 without 
> breaking up every time there is the slightest activity on the desktop, 
> and thats on a very high-end workstation, on the A20p its worse. Even 
> just general compute-intensive stuff like compiling a kernel seems to be 
> significantly slower on 2.6, so much for all the vaunted efficiency 
> improvements. Maybe in 6 months or so they'll have 2.6 tweaked up to 
> where it starts to show some advantages over 2.4, and maybe it already 
> will for certain types of loads, but I think I'm going back to 2.4.x 
> series on the desktop for a while...
> 

On SuSE's 2.6.3-30 kernel, I see faster bootup and audio runs fine.  I
can play a 56kps mp3 stream from the Internet, compile the kernel, and
install some packages from CD-ROM with Yast2 at the same time without
a skip.  This is on a T41.

HTH,
  Jeffrey